Title: Stormy Weather

Title:Stormy Weather

Author(s):Hilton Als

Source:The New Yorker. 84.30 (Sept. 29, 2008): p92. From LiteratureResourceCenter.

Document Type:Theater review

Bookmark:Bookmark this Document

Has "The Tempest" become Shakespeare's black play? In the course of his writing life, the monumental poet created several black, or Moorish, characters: there's Othello, of course, and Aaron from "Titus Andronicus," not to mention the prince of Morocco from "The Merchant of Venice." But, for a number of scholars, race is essential to the plot in several of his other dramas as well, "The Tempest" principal among them.

At the start of the play (now at the Classic Stage Company, under the direction of Brian Kulick), Alonso, the king of Naples (Michael Potts), is on his way home from Tunis, where he and some members of his court, including his son and heir apparent, Ferdinand (the stellar Stark Sands), have just attended his daughter's wedding to an African. How Alonso and company end up shipwrecked near the "stillvex'd Bermudas"--then in vogue as one of England's more recent "discoveries"--is any navigator's guess, but without the storm that carried them there they would never have happened upon the island's inhabitants: Prospero (Mandy Patinkin), his daughter, Miranda (the increasingly brilliant Elisabeth Waterston), and his two familiars, a sprite named Ariel (Angel Desai) and his slave, Caliban (Nyambi Nyambi).

Almost at once, in this play about family, the arrival myth, and creation, Shakespeare introduces two states that artists must experience in order to produce their work: empathy and distance. Miranda--who, like an actress, feels language and lives it--complains to her father about the storm that he has conjured up, because she herself shares the distress of the men on board the ship. "O! I have suffered / With those that I saw suffer. A brave vessel / (Who had, no doubt, some noble creature in her) / Dash'd all to pieces!," she exclaims. "O, the cry did knock / Against my very heart." And it is here that Prospero steps in as Shakespeare's alter ego, instigating and controlling the spectacle that we are about to watch. Consoling Miranda, he tells her the truth about why he and she are living so far from home--because he, the rightful duke of Milan, was usurped by his brother, Antonio, whose nefarious political skills won him favor with the king of Naples. Prospero and Miranda were cast out to sea, along with Prospero's beloved books--"Me (poor man) my library / Was dukedom large enough," he says earlier. Eventually, they landed on the island they now call their home, where magic coexists with Prospero's philological impulses. In one of the more beautiful exchanges that Prospero and Miranda have during this reminiscence, he suggests to his child that the life he has provided for her has been a richer one than she would have had in Milan. "Have I, thy schoolmaster, made thee more profit / Than other princess' can, that have more time / For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful," he says. "Heavens thank you for't," Miranda replies.

Shakespeare finished "The Tempest" in 1611. Having written historical dramas, epic tragedies, and comedies about love, betrayal, and the ultimate ineffability of the human condition, in this play (likely the last that was wholly his own) he displayed a sweet acceptance of the imagination--of storytelling--as the common denominator among us, the faculty that links us all, or separates us from one another. The magnitude of Prospero's understanding--and the fact that he chooses to share it with a woman--is evidence of Shakespeare's unwillingness to stay within the confines of Elizabethan drama and of the society that produced it. "Why was the period of drama so short-lived, and why was one person so immeasurably better?" W. H. Auden writes in his book "Lectures on Shakespeare." "Because of the provincial character of England: England was then a province, a hick country, compared with Italy, Spain, and France. . . . Dramatists therefore had to start from scratch. That's not always a good thing." Had Shakespeare been anything less than Shakespearean, "The Tempest" might seem like a strange bit of whimsy, but what the playwright takes on here is not just magic and sprites but the nature of colonialism.

It is this aspect of "The Tempest" that has drawn the most focus in recent years--particularly as it is telescoped in the complicated relationship between Prospero and Caliban, whose rage toward his master is so great that the threat of violence runs like an electrical current between them. When Prospero first arrived on the island, he treated Caliban--the child of an island witch named Sycorax--like a surrogate son. "When thou cam'st first, / Thou strok'st me and made much of me, wouldst give me / Water with berries in't; and teach me how / To name the bigger light, and how the less, / That burn by day and night; and then I lov'd thee," Caliban says. Caliban showed his love by showing Prospero the island. In return, he claims, Prospero took his home from him. But Prospero counters with this: he could not trust Caliban with Miranda; he tried to rape her. And it is in this confusion of love, and love betrayed, that students of the play--viewing it through a postcolonial lens--detect a statement on the nature of the subjugation of blacks by whites. In her strong, lucid 2004 book, "Shakespeare After All," Marjorie Garber asks, "Why should the audience prefer Prospero the magician and his daughter Miranda over Sycorax the magician and her son Caliban?" The obvious answer is that Shakespeare does not make the latter relationship central to the drama--something that the poet and activist Aime Cesaire sought to correct in his 1969 play "A Tempest," which told the story from Caliban's point of view. But, like many "inspired by" works, Cesaire's adaptation falters on the first page, in this case with the stage direction: "Ambience of a psychodrama."

To focus on these elements of the play is to forget that the center of the drama, at least in this production, is Miranda's and Prospero's evolution from solitary exiles to loving citizens of the world. Mandy Patinkin became something of a star in the early eighties, when the De Niro-Pacino era--ordinary Joe becomes leading man and finds love with Meryl Streep or Michelle Pfeiffer--had already been established, and ethnic-looking leading men were still in fashion. Patinkin, who is Jewish, had an appealing quality on film in those years: sturdy, fighting his way around whatever obstacles society put in his way. But onstage he is odd to watch. In this production, he doesn't seem to connect with the other actors or with the text; he is isolated in the part. Waterston, for example--she has the kind of fine, melancholy features that Ingres loved to draw--pays close attention to Patinkin as he speaks, but he barely seems to register her. And whenever he has a speech to deliver he bellows and races through it. Prospero is angry about the past, of course, but not all the time. It's difficult to tell whether this interpretation--which reveals little about Prospero's progression from spurned nobleman to wise artist--is due to Kulick's direction or to Patinkin himself, but you can certainly feel that Patinkin is more relaxed when he sings, or stands alone onstage addressing the audience directly, than when he is called upon to respond to the other performers. In short, one suspects that Patinkin is less an actor than a monologuist, interested mostly in his song of the self.

The only actors who seem to connect are Waterston and Sands. In the lovely scene in Act III when Ferdinand professes his love, we're given a glimmer of what this production might have been had all the actors interacted: a kind of homage to forgiveness. Ultimately, Shakespeare was writing not about race but about the disavowal of loneliness--a theme that Auden took up in his astonishing poem based on the play, "The Sea and the Mirror," in which Caliban is transformed into a lonely young man in a single bed, dreaming of love in a syntax influenced by Henry James.

Hilton Als

Source Citation

Als, Hilton. "Stormy Weather." The New Yorker 29 Sept. 2008: 92. LiteratureResourceCenter. Web. 27 July 2010.

Document URL